IEEE 802.11 timing synchronization based wireless sensor system for vibration measurement

Network based wireless sensing has become an important area of research and various new applications for remote sensing are expected to emerge. One of the promising applications is structural health monitoring of building or civil engineering structure and it often requires vibration measurement. For the vibration measurement via wireless network, time synchronization is indispensable. In this paper, we introduce a newly developed time synchronized wireless sensor network system. The system employs IEEE 802.11 standard based TSF counter and sends the measured data with the counter value. TSF based synchronization enables consistency on common clock among different wireless nodes. We consider the scale effect on the synchronization accuracy and the effect is evaluated by stochastic analysis and simulation studies. A new wireless sensing system was developed and the hardware and software specifications are shown. The experiments were conducted in a reinforced concrete building and results showed that the system performed more than sufficiently.